The Carpenter's Son Review: Nicolas Cage Distracts In An Underwhelming Biblical Horror Despite A Solid Effort From Noah Jupe

Lotfy Nathan’s Roman-era horror The Carpenter’s Son is borne from a conflagration of Biblical texts, which all somehow converge to create something far more convoluted than its itinerant parts. The main text in question is The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a mid-second-century gospel that has only survived in a handful of extant parts, and which depicts Jesus’s life between the ages of five and 12 as one pockmarked by temptations of evil. Like a superhero just beginning to grasp the extent of their powers, Jesus (Noah Jupe) is here shown as a human teenager whose ability to give and take life is a form of rare puberty.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was dismissed by early Biblical scholars as heretical since it presents an image of Jesus as fallible and, sometimes, malicious. And that spirit pervades Nathan’s unnerving portrait of God’s son, who seems to be balancing on a razor’s edge between benevolence and malevolence. The 21-year-old Jupe (credited simply as “The Boy”) plays Jesus like a tempestuous young man, as unaware of his own abilities as he is of the way of the world.

Nathan’s film is intriguing and frequently unsettling, with an especially magnetic denouement, but it doesn’t stand on its own two feet without the pre-knowledge of its source material. Most damning, however, is the entirely bizarre casting of Nicolas Cage and FKA twigs as the boy’s adopted parents, both of whom disrupt Nathan’s clear mission of location and era specificity, as neither of them is inseparable from their off-screen personae.

The Carpenter’s Son Portrays Jesus As A Man More Tempted By Evil Than By Benevolence

The Carpenter’s Son mostly takes place in AD 15, with the teenage Jesus blissfully unaware of who his actual parentage is, nor even that he has been adopted by his father, the titular Carpenter (Cage). The Carpenter’s infrequent, cryptic voiceover wonders about what happens when confronted with death, and tells us that his son possesses a power he cannot understand. He seems to mean that literally, as he insists throughout the film that he and The Mother (twigs) move at the first possible instance of The Boy learning who he is. “Calamity follows us,” he warns.

The family arrives at a small village in Egypt (actually Greece), where Cage gets a job constructing idols for worship against his faith. For fear of religious persecution, the three lie about their whereabouts, and both the Carpenter and the Boy are frequently plagued by nightmares of crucifixion. It isn’t long before the Boy is confronted by a devilish Stranger (Isla Johnston) who tempts him with dangerous games and seductions. In one of those “games,” the Stranger challenges him to see how close he can get to touching a leper, which he does — until she shoves him onto the dying man with malicious laughter.

Things get bad for the Boy when the leper in question miraculously starts to heal, and word spreads amongst this small community that he might have God-given powers. Confused himself, the Boy tests his abilities by crushing a grasshopper in his hands and just as soon revives it. Meanwhile, Cage yells indiscriminately in abject panic and chews the scenery so hard you can practically see his teeth marks.

Twigs is just as out of place here in her second leading role after 2024’s remake of The Crow, her perpetually placid demeanor unbefitting a woman who has been impregnated by God. There’s a distinct oddity to her casting in a film that is otherwise intent on portraying an apocryphal story as verified material. Jupe and Johnston are mesmerizing, however, and the two lend serious credence to Nathan’s enterprise. As an exercise in humanizing a deity, The Carpenter’s Son does, at least, succeed in presenting the internal battle of good or evil in all its murkiness, in part because Jupe’s characterization is so vulnerable.

Heretical or not, it’s a captivating story, even when it seems predicated solely on vibes. It’s a shame, then, that the film is not as accessible as Jupe is as an actor. The first two acts move like molasses, brimming with allegory that never quite translates off the page. Yet, the film ends with a crackling final act, positively hellish in scope and in horror, as Jesus navigates the temptation of the Stranger and the false promises of parents who have lied to him. If Jesus really did go through this only to go on to become the selfless image of goodness he now occupies, it is certainly a triumph of moral will. With all of cinematographer Simon Beaufils’s tactile compositions, the Son of God has never been more immediate.